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Category: Customer Experience
Evolution Revolution: TLF Client Conference 2018
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
In March we gathered, once again, at One Great George Street in London for our annual client conference. It’s one of our favourite days of the year, despite the nerves and inevitable (hopefully invisible) minor backstage disasters. It’s a chance for our clients to meet each other, hear from an inspirational keynote speaker, and learn lessons from some client case studies. We also enjoy...
CX World Tour
By Andy Butler, Client Manager, TLF Research
Working in customer experience is a fascinating line of work – but at times it can also be so frustrating. It’s fascinating as, in measuring customer experience and helping organisations drive changes that enhance the customer journey; I fully understand the value this can have for customers and for a business. But frustrating when every day I see customer experience fails - surely it ...
Why Should I Come To Your Store?
By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research
It’s 70 years since the first self-service supermarket opened in the UK. Even though it was over 30 years behind its arrival in America some members of the British public were far from prepared. There were reports that one frustrated shopper annoyed at having to select her own shopping threw a basket at Alan Sainsbury, grandson of founder John James Sainsbury and the brains behind the introd...
Biffa: Superbrand, So What?
By Guy Maddock, Group Head of Marketing, Biffa
Biffa was recently recognised as a UK business Superbrand. But what does this mean and how should a brand use this information within its own commercial activities?
From the outset I should state that Biffa is not a sexy brand, and it certainly doesn’t operate in a sexy sector, and yet for the 11th consecutive year Biffa was identified in the annual Superbrands index as the UK’s No.1 b...
Nationwide: Making the Connection
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
Using technology to get closer to customers
It’s hard to avoid coverage of the impact of technology on customer experience. Whether it’s AI, digital channels, or augmented reality, technology is mounting an assault on the traditions of customer service.
Too often this is billed as being in opposition to the human-to-human interactions of traditional customer service: AI will replace ag...
Mapping The Customer Journey
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
All of a sudden, everyone is Mapping The Customer Journey. It’s a concept that has been around in customer research for decades, but its recent rise to prominence may be linked to the success of service design thinking. Why is it so hot right now?
Done well it has the ability to drive quick changes to organisations’ processes, culture, and frontline behaviour based on a customer-led vi...
TLF Customer Experience Conference 2017
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
In March we hosted our Annual Client Conference in London, returning to One Great George Street’s impressive Brunel lecture theatre and Great Hall. Whether they’ll let us back after Rob built a campfire on stage is another question…but more on that later.
The conference is our chance to get clients together to share ideas, to learn from each other, and to be inspired. This year ...
Customer Journey Mapping in Social Housing
By Andy Butler, Client Manager, TLF Research
As housing associations continue to refine services to improve the customer experience, customer journey mapping is increasingly used as a valuable insight tool which can aid the redesign of such services. Here we explore journey mapping and the value it can provide housing associations.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
Put simply, it is a diagram, in order, of the important touchpoints...
Loyalty: The Blueprint to Success
By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research
Customers across many companies feel aggrieved that their loyalty is not rewarded – hardly surprising when they see new customers getting all the best offers. This is not the scenario at Huddersfield Town Association Football Club (HTAFC) where the entire commercial strategy is based on rewarding loyalty. Here are some of the most eye catching examples.
The Premiership Pledge
Back in 2010 HT...
What is NPS?
By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research
A bigger Net Promoter Score means there are more promoters compared to detractors. The aim is to get as high a score as possible.
What is NPS?
Ideally every business wants more customers saying good things about them (recommending them) than saying bad things about them and actively putting potential customers off.
Any positive Net Promoter Score (NPS) means there are more customers acting positi...
16th Annual Customer Experience Conference
By Greg Roche, Director, TLF Research
Almost 200 people gathered together at One Great George Street between the Houses of Parliament and Horse Guards Parade for TLF’s 16th Annual Customer Experience Conference. It was the 4th consecutive year for the venue, home to the Institution of Civil Engineers. Anyone who’s seen the amazing Georgian interiors will know why delegates rate this higher than any other venue on the post-...
Competitor Analysis
By TLF Research
Customers tend to benchmark organisations very widely, comparing them with their experiences across many different sectors.
Often customers’ recent experience is limited to one organisation per sector. They simply don’t currently deal with more than one local council, one mortgage lender, one mobile phone provider or one housing association. At other times, however, customers are much...
What is Customer Effort?
By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research
The July-August 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review featured an article, by Dixon et al, entitled Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.
Over a three year period, the authors had conducted research, with 75,000 B2B and B2C customers about their recent interactions with staff and self-service contact centres. Based on the research, the authors made some interesting assertions about the link ...
Warming Up
By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research
Improve response rates and quality of response through effective pre-survey communications.
A well executed warm up campaign will make your survey more cost effective by shortening the field work period (achieving interviews or responses more quickly) and increasing the response rate. It could also stimulate response from a wider range of customers, generating a more representative result and imp...
Financial Services Complaints Management Forum
By Iain Law, Client Manager, TLF Research
At the start of the 14th annual Financial Services Complaints Management Forum the FCA provided an update on their complaints reporting requirements, which will be implemented in June 2016.These are the main points:- An extension of the ‘next business day rule’, where firms are permitted to handle complaints less formally, without sending a final response letter, to the close of ...
Omnichannel
By Nick Mitchell, Managing Director, EMEA at [24]7
Why it’s time for customer service to go omnichannelIt’s well recognised that consumers are increasingly choosing to use many different communication channels when transacting with customers. A survey at the end of 2013 for CRM software specialists Zendesk of 7,000 consumers in 7 countries showed that 67% of online shoppers had made purchases that involved multiple channels in the prev...
Why Do Companies Never Learn?
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
When you’ve been in this game as long as I have you do wonder sometimes how companies can just keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. In the name of performance improvement they spend vast amounts of money on consultants, training, learning but still make schoolboy errors when it comes to getting the basics right.To illustrate, I’m going to depart from my norm...
Satisfying the High Rollers
by TLF Research
Does being a high roller guarantee better service and therefore mean you are more likely to be a satisfied customer? The simple and straightforward answer would seem to be yes. Picture Richard Gere in Pretty Woman producing his exclusive, unlimited credit card and the ensuing service borne only of those who sense a big tip is in the air.
However scratch the surface of service in these platinum pla...
How impressed is your board when you present survey results?
By Darren Wake, Business Development Manager, TLF Research
Yes I do know they’re not easy to impress, but do we always help ourselves by the way we present results from customer surveys? I think the problem stems from the fact that the people responsible for the surveys (whether research agencies or company managers) are immersed in the detail of the survey, keen to tell the full story and too obsessed with demonstrating the credibility / statistica...
Why Do Customers Switch
By TLF Research
In September 2011 I took a family holiday in Turkey with a leading tour operator. The sun shone, the 5 star hotel was clean and well appointed, the food fantastic and my children loved it. All in all a recipe for the perfect holiday, one very happy customer you might think and a guaranteed repeat booking for next year...or maybe not?A recent study by the Institute for Customer Service says f...
Bringing the Voice of the Customer into the Boardroom
By TLF Research
One of the biggest frustrations of customer insight and customer contact staff is how to convey customers’ views to senior management in a way that makes them sit up and take notice. It’s difficult with statistics, almost impossible with reports – and please don’t show me another PowerPoint presentation!! Of course, for some time it’s been possible to video customers....
Storytelling Maximising the Impact of Customer Research
By Iain Law, Client Manager, TLF Research
Research has been commissioned and insight identified but getting individuals to change their behaviours in order to produce an improved customer experience has proven to be more difficult. Does this scenario sound familiar?Experience has shown that ‘Storytelling’ can be an extremely useful tool for organisations to maximise the impact of customer research. Within this article we aim t...
Selecting the Best Survey Method - Part 1
By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research
Current technology has multiplied the number of ways to collect customer feedback, often making it confusing to work out the best way to carry out customer research. Sarah Stainthorpe provides a summary of the different types of research and their purposes, as well as the pros and cons of different ways of obtaining customer feedback.
Underlying attitudes or transaction specific?
Fundamentall...
Selecting the Best Survey Method - Part 2
By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research
Research - Selecting the best survey method
In the last edition of Stakeholder Satisfaction we discussed the pros and cons of different survey methods. In this article, we will go into more detail about some of the latest self-completion methods, which we had said were useful for conducting transactional customer experience research in particular
The three types of self-completion survey method we...
Co-creation - Part 2 Value through choice
By TLF Research
Co-creaction - Part 2 Value through choice
Some trends over the last couple of decades are well known. Exponential technological innovation has led to huge efficiency savings enabling firms to provide better value to customers. But they’ve had to because customers’ unprecedented access to information and easy networking with other customers has turned them into expert and confident buy...
Co-creation - Part 3 of the new cutomer experience
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
Co-creationPart 3: With customers not at customersThis article, the third in our series on co-creation is based on Stephen Hampshire’s presentation at The Leadership Factor conference in Manchester in March 2010.The basic purpose of co-creation is to help all businesses to engage more closely with their customers. I’m going to focus on three aspects of co-creation:why co-creation is di...
Fast Guide - Attitudes and behaviours
By TLF Research
Fast Guide - Attitudes and behaviour
Many organisations fail to manage customers effectively because they don’t distinguish between customers’ attitudes and behaviour. Both are relevant to customer satisfaction and loyalty, but they’re different concepts requiring different information and decision making. Since it’s behaviours that deliver financial benefits we will examin...
Customer - Loyalty: customer insight or sales promotion?
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
In November 2004, Hurricane Frances was rushing towards the Florida coastline. Some residents were already in their cars heading inland. Much further inland in Bentonville, Arkansas, there was also much activity in the Wal-Mart office as CIO Linda Dillman encouraged staff to take advantage of the company’s ‘predictive technology’. With almost 4,000 stores in the US and around 100...
Research - Interviewing hard to reach customers
By TLF Research
One of the main aspects of b2b research that distinguishes it from b2c is the greater difficulty of securing a response, whether the survey is self-completion or interviews. The most challenging task for researchers, however, is to interview certain hard to reach b2b audiences on the telephone. This is the main reason why b2b surveys cost more than b2c, but often research budgets still don’t...
The Voice of the Customer
BY Nigel Hill, Client Manager, TLF Research
These days few company bosses would disagree with the words of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton:"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everyone in the company from the Chairman down, simply by spending money somewhere else."So everybody’s interested in the Voice of the Customer but what exactly does it mean? Sam Walton was very clear about the goal – customers spending money...
A great customer experience... Through The Customers' Eyes
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
A few years ago we all used to talk about satisfying customers and improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, some of the latest buzzwords that we are encouraged to strive for include delighting rather than satisfying customers, build a relationship with customers, improve customers’ emotional engagement with your company and even deliver a customer experience so great that your cus...
Doing best what matters most to the customer
By TLF Research
It’s official – the most successful organisations are going soft – they’re becoming human again! They’ve remembered, ‘just in time’ (no pun intended), that ultimately business is about people – it’s about human beings, being human.
The key assets of most organisations are not the buildings people work in, or the equipment and machines people o...
I'll have the same again please - Why Consistency Matters
By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research
Millions of people travel frequently to London, some for business, others for pleasure. For those who need to stay overnight, there are literally thousands of hotels to choose from so finding a room isn’t difficult. But talk to many of these visitors and you will discover that, by choice, they will always stay in the same hotel or the use the same chain time after time.
These customers are &...
Do Customers Like Being Surveyed?
By Nigel Hill
Founder of The Leadership Factor and editor of Customer Insight
If a company that you do business with writes to you, telephones or emails asking you to provide feedback on how satisfied you are with the service you’re getting from them, how do you react? Do you
a. Regard it as totally unreasonable behaviour by the supplier?
b. Feel that it shows they care about how you feel as a customer?
c. See it as a pointless exercise that won’t make any di...
Customer service starts at the top
By TLF Research
Don Hales, Founder & Chairman of Judges of the National Customer Service Awards has had the opportunity to study at close quarters customer service in many leading organisations in every service sector. He is convinced that the secret to great customer service lies in leadership. He has linked with leading research organisation, Glowinkowski International to establish the behaviours of top cus...
Making The Grade
By TLF Research
City & Guilds is a household name that strives to stay on top of the game by reacting to and anticipating the needs of its customers. A customer satisfaction survey sits next to other research activity to feed information into ongoing initiatives to improve and make the process easier for customers. A mixture of innovation and concentrating on getting the basics right is paying steady dividend...
Rewarding Customer Satisfaction
By TLF Research
How do you feel after you've stayed at a hotel where you were treated like a VIP? Great, relaxed and happy! You book a return visit and you tell your friends about it. How do you feel after visiting a retail store where the sales representatives treated you as an "inconvenience" they had to deal with? Annoyed, dissatisfied and negative! You tell your friends and they tell other people too. Next ti...
10 Customer Centred Lessons
By TLF Research
Harvard Professor John Kotter, with the help of some old video clips of Jack Welch and other leaders addressing his Harvard students twenty years or so ago, asked us why some companies had become customer-centred over the past 25 years, but many had not. "Tom Peters (with Bob Waterman) was the first to say 'Customer, Customer, Customer,' in answer to the question 'What makes a company great over t...
Understanding financial implications of customer service
By TLF Research
My greatest claim to fame in the world of customer service is that seven years ago, assisted by my colleagues at Quest Media, I launched the National Customer Service Awards and I remain the chairman of judges for the programme to this day.Nowadays I combine that activity with speaking, writing and consulting on customer service and my specialist subject is helping people understand the financial ...
Maximising loyalty the publishers way
By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research
Maximising loyalty the publishers’ way
Readers of Stakeholder know the benefits of keeping customers highly satisfied. Whatever your favoured acronym or model, the message is the same - highly satisfied customers behave in a way that will benefit your business both in the short-term and long-term. As long you are able to keep them highly satisfied, that is.
They will buy more, pay more, stay...
Holding on to Stakeholders when it hits the fan
By TLF Research
I am starring in a play and, just as the curtains start to roll back, I realise that a) I have learned the lines to the wrong play and, b) I am stark naked. Before the men in white coats come to take me away, let me say in my defence that this is apparently quite a common sort of dream for strange people like me - and that it is hardly surprising after years of working in crisis management. For a ...
Empowerment - How far dare you go?
By TLF Research
Empowerment is not a new concept in customer service but Don Hales, founder and chairman of the judges of the National Customer Service Awards, has discovered from this year's finals that more companies than ever are releasing staff from strict rules and providing more freedom to act on their own initiative, allowing them to provide real service in response to customer needs. But how far can you g...
Rating Scales in Customer Satisfaction Research
By Nigel Hill
Founder of The Leadership Factor and editor of Customer Insight
1. Interval versus ordinal scales It is not unusual in satisfaction research to see simple verbal scales, where each point on the scale is given a verbal description (e.g. 'strongly agree', 'agree' or 'very satisfied', 'satisfied' etc). The problem is that such scales have only ordinal properties. They give an order from good to bad or satisfied to dissatisfied without quantifying it. In othe...
Fast Guide - Customer Service
By TLF Research
Peel back the layers and you will discover that at the heart of any successful business lies its customers - cosseted, consulted, listened to, respected and appreciated. They are the leaders, the catalysts for future development. As Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive, Tesco once remarked, “We follow the customer, if they change, we change.” Quality customer service is critical - it is th...
Annual customer satisfaction and loyalty conference 2006
By TLF Research
The Leadership Factor’s seventh annual conference on ‘customer satisfaction and loyalty’ took place on 2nd February. This year, like the most fickle of football fans, we abandoned Man Utd. (location for last year’s conference) and took up with Chelsea. Robert kicked off (sorry!) the day by introducing the ICS and its work, covering the ICS model for world class customer ser...
SOCAP in Europe's Annual Conference
By TLF Research
Of huge interest was the first day appearance of Rachel Elnaugh as keynote speaker. Rachel had been booked before the much publicised collapse of Red Letter Days and it is testament to her courage that she didn’t cancel despite a further hauling over the coals the previous Friday, this time on Tonight with Trevor McDonald. SOCAPie CEO, Derek Williams decided to run the slot as a question and...
UK Customer Experience Awards
By TLF Research
Customer service is frequently quoted as being the most important factor in today’s economic climate in the battle to win, retain and grow customers. The importance of customer service cannot be underestimated but Awards International, a company that specialises in award programmes, believes that what really counts for customers in deciding where to spend their money is what it feels like to...
Conference - European Customer Experience World
By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research
The European Customer Experience World conference was held at the Radisson, Heathrow Airport on the 20th and 21st May. The focus was ‘delivering a great customer experience while improving operational performance’. Here are just some of the case studies outlined at the conference…
Why is a clear vision important?
A company’s vision needs to recognise the link between the...
ECEW - Conference 2011
By Greg Roche, Director, TLF Research
This year’s conference was held at the Sofitel Hotel at Heathrow and, as usual, featured a large array of interesting and varied speakers. This article highlights some of the most interesting speakers who made the strongest points about how to improve business performance through a strong focus on customer experience. Amongst the most enlightening was Anthony Thompson, founder and Chairman o...
Complaint Research Data - True or False?
By TLF Research
On 25th October 1946 at 8.30pm in room H3, the Gibbs Building, King’s College, Cambridge, an emotion-laden, and some say violent, encounter took place between the rival philosophers Popper and Wittgenstein . To this day no one can agree what happened between them in a meeting that lasted just 10 minutes. This is all the more astonishing because the events took place in front of an audience o...
15th Annual Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Conference
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
Wednesday March 12th saw nearly 200 senior managers and customer insight professionals sampling some excellent chocolate chip cookies prior to the start of TLF’s 15th annual Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Conference at The Institution of Civil Engineers’ head office in Westminster. One Great George St is a magnificent Grade II listed, four-domed, Edwardian building. In its splendid ...
TLF Annual Conference - Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
By TLF Research
First up was Linda Wallace from Richmond Housing Partnership (RHP), a major London social landlord, owning and managing more than 8,500 homes in Richmond & Hounslow. The company has 220 staff and an annual turnover of £33m. Housing associations are ‘not for profit’ businesses with a remit to provide affordable quality homes to less advantaged members of society. The average r...
Complaint Handling
By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research
Why are complaints valuable?
It’s a cliché, for good reason, but complaints provide businesses with some real opportunities. For a start, a complaint gives you a chance to see your organisation through the eyes of a customer. By pointing out flaws and weaknesses you are being given a chance to make corrections and improve your performance. By improving performance customers will be mo...
The Gospel according to Carl (Sewell)
By Nigel Hill
Founder of The Leadership Factor and Editor of Customer Insight Magazine
When Carl Sewell joined the family firm in 1967 it was third out of three Cadillac dealerships in Dallas. Today it’s the biggest in America, $450million big, and all built on Sewell’s Ten Commandments of Customer Service. His principles work across the full market spectrum from Chevvys to Cadillacs and from Hyundais to Lexuses and will almost certainly apply just as well to solicitors,...
ICS Annual Conference 2010
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
The green end of a hard winter
ICS annual conference 2010
A new beginning... ...the renaissance of customer service
The economy, predictably enough, was high on the agenda at this year's ICS conference. That didn't mean that it was depressing, with one exception, but it did make you wonder about the "green shoots" featured on the front of the delegate pack. The conference was entitled "a new be...
Tattoo You: Super Loyalty
By TLF Research
Ask a Harley-Davidson senior executive what they sell and you'll get the answer. And it's not motorbikes. "We sell to 43-year-old accountants the ability to dress in leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of them," says Harley-Davidson VP John Russell. Harley-Davidson executives love repeating this quote. It first appeared, to our knowledge, in the book Results-Based Leadershi...
